Instructions for preparing proposal Part b for Integrated Projects in the ist priority

3.3 Business: strengthening IPTV in Europe

IP-based video (including IPTV) is a growth market globally. ConnectME can provide the technologies to place Europe at the innovative forefront of IPTV service creation and provision. Already, Europe is being heralded as the potential market leader in IPTV²² with 40% of the world's IPTV subscribers and nearly half of the sector's revenues in.

Yet television, while playing a significant role in the everyday life of citizens globally, remains a largely passive experience with limited interaction possibilities. The much heralded convergence of television and the Web still tends to mean only that content from both sources share the same cable, and that the content may be switched between or viewed in parallel on the same device. For true interaction with digital content, citizens still need to switch to their computer or other Web-enabled device, relying on a browser or associated plug-ins.

Faced with the explosion of digital audio-visual content on the Web, much of it user-generated or independently produced, the traditional media creators and deliverers – including television companies and telecommunication operators - face a challenge to their business models as users face broader choice and greater flexibility in their viewing activity. Despite traditional media players tending to have higher quality, more professional, and branded material , the digital citizen is drawn to innovative new ways to access and interact with digital content, where the traditional marketplace is in danger of finding itself playing catch-up. Established "old" players risk losing touch with the younger generation (especially the under 20s) who have grown up with the Internet and for whom the idea of a shared television viewing experience or the need to watch a particular program at a particular time is something hard to imagine²³.

The investment in IPTV (estimated at a total $21 billion²⁴) needs to be complemented with new innovation which can use the convergence of TV and Web content to provide new types of interactive service to the digital citizen. This can help produce new market opportunities, particularly for SMEs, protect the business models of the traditional media companies, give European IPTV technology a competitive advantage in a growth market and support the digital society by enabling new forms of information access to citizens.

If this succeeds, IPTV can become a “potential goldmine” for the key business players in the IPTV market²⁵. Service providers, it is found, “to make any headway at all, ...they will need to develop unique and compelling applications”. We believe that the converged services that can be made possible over the ConnectME framework can hold the key to establishing European leadership in IPTV technology and to unlocking the “goldmine” of new compelling IPTV applications.

3.4 Why Europe?

The work of ConnectME is necessarily European because (a) it is within Europe where much of the leading research in the relevant fields (video analysis, Web data mining, multimedia annotation, Linked Data, user interfaces, multimedia presentation) is taking place (b) it is within Europe where emerging players in sectors of TV & video production, TV broadcasting and software for the development and consumption of online media are encountering huge opportunities for growth and yet strong global competition, and it is the unique innovation and research skills of European multimedia researchers who can provide new solutions to give them the competitive edge.

3.5. Why will we succeed?

With regard to other research activities, the research community relevant to ConnectME is sufficiently small to be aware of other work, and big enough to carry out the proposed work. The consortium is European in nature, with many of the consortium members being key players in their respective research area, equipped with excellent contacts to other actors in the community. Hence, through conferences and other research events, the consortium is able to keep abreast of developments outside of ConnectME. To formalize this, a specific task has been created to monitor ongoing activities to identify potential developments which may impact the workplan. Through early recognition of such developments, the ConnectME management structure is in a position and has been assigned the powers to consider and execute workplan changes, e.g. take advantage of external results or refocus areas in the workplan. As part of the dissemination activities, partners have the opportunity to identify potentially related activities at national and international events and reach out to external partners to determine potential complementary activities, or discuss overlaps. However, it can also be clearly stated that, to the best of the knowledge of the consortium, no existing project or other research activity focuses on the central goal of ConnectME: intuitive access to objects in video to provide dynamically generated multimedia presentations about concepts using media extracted semantically from the Web. Many other activities in the multimedia research community are complementary to tasks or sub-tasks of ConnectME, and the partners of the consortium are already involved in or aware of such activities (and will continue to do so in the duration of the project) and hence are well suited to guide their workpackages to successful, innovative and new research results. In fact, partners are often themselves involved in other activities, giving ConnectME strong co-operation opportunities. In particular, standardisation activities will be carefully monitored and to the best of the partner's abilities influenced by our work, so that standards in this area are complementary to our results.

The achievement of this impact is most heavily predicated on the non-emergence of a similar solution in the project duration. This may occur if there is work taking place in the field which is not public, e.g. within a commercial organization. Market and product reports will attempt to anticipate new developments in the area of IP-based video provsion and related sectors of relevance to the ConnectME work, and ensure ConnectME's uniqueness in what will be a rapidly growing market. As partners come from the broadcasting, content provision, network operation, server side software and client side software sectors, we are in a good position to keep in touch with developments in each of these areas. Also, each of the partners has a strategic interest in knowing the state_of-the-art in their respective business area. Given the preconditions for the ConnectME framework, including the multimedia semantic modeling and meeting research challenges such as concept extraction at instance level or generating dynamically multimedia presentations, it is unlikely that a commercial solution will emerge in the short term sufficiently close to the ConnectME objective (see also the state-of-the-art section for an indication of what can be expected in the next 1-3 years)